To Action: Easy Decisions

Valuable Decision Making is one of the most important elements of driving Valuable Change. Courage (or cowardice) when making decisions will make or break your change success.

Let’s do a little mental exercise. Bring into your mind a project or program that you may have worked on, led, or merely spectated that meets one or more of the following criteria:

• It never ended,
• It caused more pain than gain,
• It didn’t solve the original problem or meet the original need,
• It regularly surprised its stakeholders,
• It was filled with ‘last minute scrambles’, or
• It had no way of proving success (although it may well have claimed it was ‘successful’).

Got a project in mind? Great.

Now reflect on the way decisions were made in that project. Would you say that the decisions were cowardly or courageous?

Here’s a few hints:

• Were decisions deferred until the last minute?
• Were decisions made as knee-jerk reactions?
• Were decision makers sufficiently across the issues, or was it closer to shooting in the dark?

So, what makes a decision courageous?

As always with me, it’s simple: ‘A courageous decision is one that chooses the harder right over the easier (or even harder) wrong.’

Unfortunately, we aren’t operating in a comic book universe. Saying ‘choose the right’ would be foolishly naïve. Reality, especially when changing organisations, is filled with shades of grey. These shades of grey often leave us in difficult spots – which logically brings us to the real question here:

‘How do we ensure we make the best decision?’

The answer is simple: Make it as easy as possible.